Learning to Protest: High School Student Activism in Segregated Schools during the Civil Rights Movement

In October of 1960, nearly 5,000 students walked out of middle and high schools in Charleston, South Carolina to protest inequitable school funding.  In May of 1963, approximately 3,000 students walked out of segregated schools in Jackson, Mississippi.   School walkouts and boycotts such as these disrupted the educational policy of the Civil Rights Movement, which focused on achieving integration through the courts.  Student-led protest at the secondary level accelerated the desegregation of all white schools and attempted to improve existing facilities. This paper aims to reconstruct this history of student activism in segregated middle and high schools during the Civil Rights Movement between 1955 and 1970 in Charleston and Jackson to complicate the dominant narrative focused on educational reform in the courts.  Examining this history from the participants’ perspective demonstrates how students and a core group of activist teachers used schools as sites of critical resistance.  This organization is indicative of community-based reform that challenged white school boards’ privatization policies within a burgeoning grassroots conservative movement.

Schools became important sites of protest, experienced by thousands of students in places like Jackson and Charleston, yet this form of protest at younger levels of public education is an overlooked form of civil rights dissent. Scholars of the Civil Rights Movement acknowledge the existence of middle and high school activism, but agency is typically ascribed to slightly older college students.  This paper expands the notion of student activism to include middle and high school students.  This history suggests that segregated black institutions, and the teacher activists and the larger community that supported them, accelerated desegregation and transformed the schoolhouse into an important ideological and organizational space of the Civil Rights Movement.